"Pestilent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said not a word. ''Tis conscience that makes cowards of us all.' He felt on his cheek the sharp points of Eleanor's fingers, and did not know who might have seen the blow, who might have told the tale to this pestilent woman who took such delight in jeering him. He stood there, therefore, red as a carbuncle and mute as a fish; grinning just sufficiently to show his teeth; ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... none for the wicked; and nought For the souls that with teeming corruption are fraught. The world would be small, were its oceans all land, To harbour and feed such a pestilent band. ...
— Friends and Neighbors - or Two Ways of Living in the World • Anonymous
... worms wriggled and writhed amid the sickly reeds. Swarms of buzzing, piping insects rose up at every step and formed a dense cloud around our heads, settling on our hands and faces and inoculating us with their filthy venom. Never had I ventured into so pestilent and ...
— The Mystery of Cloomber • Arthur Conan Doyle
... is done in the world with very little interest or design. He that assumes the character of a critick, and justifies his claim by perpetual censure, imagines that he is hurting none but the author, and him he considers as a pestilent animal, whom every other being has a right to persecute; little does he think how many harmless men he involves in his own guilt, by teaching them to be noxious without malignity, and to repeat objections ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... convinced (having read this morning) that the review in the 'Annals' (Annals and Mag. of Nat. Hist. third series, vol. 5, page 132. My father has obviously taken the expression "pestilent" from the following passage (page 138): "But who is this Nature, we have a right to ask, who has such tremendous power, and to whose efficiency such marvellous performances are ascribed? What are her image and attributes, when dragged ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... "Thus this pestilent nest of warfare and infidelity, the city of Ronda," says the worthy Fray Antonio Agapida, "was converted to the true faith by the thunder of our artillery—an example which was soon followed by Cazarabonela, ...
— Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada • Washington Irving
... disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a steril promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving how express[36] and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... had a sense of freedom, almost of licence. Nothing that had been his father's was now his own, or his mother's, except the land and house on which they were. All the great business John Grier had built up was gone into the hands of the usurper, a young, bold, pestilent, powerful, vigorous man. It seemed suddenly horrible that the timber-yards and the woods and the offices, and the buildings of John Grier's commercial business were not under his own direction, or that of his mother, or brother. They had ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... deliver himself over voluntarily into a state of bondage? Politics lose all glamor to those who have dwelt within the walls. Sir Julien has dwelt there and so have I. He knows in his heart whether it is worth while. One lives always amidst a clamor of evil tongues, a pestilent trail of poisonous suspicions. One gives up one's life to be flouted and misunderstood, to be accused of evil motives and every imaginable crime. When it is all over, when one has time to think of all that one has missed, one feels that all one has done could have been done just as well by ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... suffocation increases still more and one has a moment of agony; little as one may lift his knee for the rearward step, his back strikes the roof. In this spot it is necessary to go on all fours, still backwards. As you go down into the depth, a pestilent atmosphere and heavy as earth buries you. Your hands touch only the cold, sticky and sepulchral clay of the wall, which bears you down on all sides and enshrouds you in a dismal solitude; its blind and moldy breath touches your face. On the last steps, reached after long labor, one is ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... fortune that confounded everybody. The detested guardians of the city jail were themselves to tenant it; or, by a worse fate still, were to be consigned unpitied, and their case unjudged, to the dark and pestilent dungeons which lay below the Landgrave's castle. A few scattered cries of triumph were heard from the crowd; but they were drowned in a tumult of conflicting feelings. As human creatures, fallen under the displeasure of a despot with a judicial power of torture ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... which, even at its best, would be so deplorably imperfect, were rationally carried out, still it would not be so absolutely pestilent and debasing as it is. Physical education, rightly practiced, is a fine and indispensable process in right living. If the system had for its end the rearing of really robust and healthy creatures, it would mean something. On the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... priesthood of Zeus the Liberator, to whom I myself founded a temple, while I bestow liberty upon you." He, as I say, made these offers to the Samians; but one of them rose up and said: "Nay, but unworthy too art thou 126 to be our ruler, seeing that thou art of mean birth and a pestilent fellow besides. Rather take care that thou give an account of the money which thou ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 1(of 2) • Herodotus
... sound work, and either indulging themselves in their delights in subject, or pluming themselves on their noble motives for attempting what they cannot perform; (and observe, by the way, that a great deal of what is mistaken for conscientious motive is nothing but a very pestilent, because very subtle, condition of vanity); whereas the great men always understand at once that the first morality of a painter, as of everybody else, is to know his business; and so earnest are they in this, that many, ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... Zadig's method afford convincing evidence that, could we have been there to see, things would have looked very much as they do now. Truly the magi were wise in their generation; they foresaw rightly that this pestilent application of the principles of common sense, inaugurated by ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... intelligence, common decencies and common virtues have nothing to do with present conditions, and the ardent leveller of class-distinctions counts as his enemy any one who seeks to give the poor a truer knowledge of how far their earnings may be made to go toward securing better food or less pestilent homes. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... humbly; "but it is thus. We have here"—and he jerked his thumb towards me—"a magician of the most pestilent—um, I crave his pardon—of the very best sort, for he hath but just now, only by placing his eyes close to the nose of the worthy Captain Paulus, dragged him, the said Paulus, through the gates that Paulus ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... altered. This olde manne his sonne tracking the Foxe so running away, came to that pit whereof I spake, and in the bottome thereof he found many bones of dead men, deceiued by the deuill after that sort in time past. Thus deliuered he his father from present death, and all other from so pestilent an opinion. ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of - The English Nation, Vol. 11 • Richard Hakluyt
... the gradual emasculation of the monsters of Greek myth under the pestilent influence of the Apollo Belvedere. The chimaera was a creature of whom any healthy-minded people would have been proud; but when we see it in Greek pictures we feel inclined to tie a ribbon round its neck ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... His life with fosterers; but you shall pay Full penalty.' So harsh is her exclaim. And he at hand, the husband she extols, Hounds on the cry, that prince of cowardice, From head to foot one mass of pestilent harm. Tongue-doughty champion of this women's-war. I, for Orestes ever languishing To end this, am undone. For evermore Intending, still delaying, he wears out All hope, both here and yonder. How, then, friends, Can I be moderate, or feel the touch ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... Martyr, to The Broken Heart. We must content ourselves with Gorboduc and Cornelia, with Cleopatra and Philotas, at the very best with Sejanus and The Silent Woman. Again Sidney commits himself in this same piece to the pestilent heresy of prose-poetry, saying that verse is "only an ornament of poetry;" nor is there any doubt that Milton, whether he meant it or not, fixed a deserved stigma on the Arcadia by calling it a "vain and amatorious poem." It is a poem ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... would send agents and emissaries about the kingdom to arouse, and encourage, and assemble such Saxon forces as were yet to be found. In a word, they would commence a series of measures for recovering the country from the possession of its pestilent enemy, and for restoring the rightful sovereign to the throne. The development of these projects and plans, and the measures for carrying them into effect, were very much hastened by an event which suddenly occurred in the neighborhood ...
— King Alfred of England - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... the illness, while agreeing about the nature of health. On the contrary, we all agree that England is unhealthy, but half of us would not look at her in what the other half would call blooming health. Public abuses are so prominent and pestilent that they sweep all generous people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We forget that, while we agree about the abuses of things, we should differ very much about the uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... vat I was doing," interrupted Le Breton recklessly. "I vas on my vay to ze soute aux poudres to blow you and all ze people to ze devil to keep company wiz your inqueezatif first leftenant. And I would have done eet, too, but for zat pestilent midshipman, who have ze gripe of ze devil himself. Peste! you Eengleesh, you are like ze bouledogue, ven you take hold you not nevare let ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... feel the blight of the blind, And horror comes into the heart; For nature is far more unkind Than the thousands that struggle apart. Dark, wild, inescapable dust, In fiercest, untamable clouds, That men into misery helplessly thrust, And bury in agony-shrouds; A simoom of sorrow whose pestilent breath To the strong and the weak, to the young and the old, Brings despair that is reckless of possible gain, And the awfullest anguish of death; Till the soul in its rage uncontrolled, Droops low in the horrible sickness ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... into the carriage out of this pestilent throng, that I may the better hear thee," said the governor. The Escribano entered the carriage, when in a twinkling the door was closed, the coachman smacked his whip, mules, carriage, guards, and all dashed off at a thundering rate, leaving the crowd in gaping wonderment, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... why should she be sacrificed? Were there no nurses in the country to be hired, but that she must go and remain there for a month at the bedside of a pestilent fever? There is no justice ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... "Anegada is the most easterly of the Virgin Islands; and my father always endeavours to pick it up on his westerly runs. It makes a good landfall, and enables us to continue the rest of our run with confidence, and to dodge those pestilent cruisers of yours. Anegada once sighted, my father knows every inch of the rest of the way, and could take his ship from thence to Havana blindfold, I believe. But while we are talking this water is cooling, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... pre-Reformation church. No doubt it might be deemed sufficient proof of this to subjoin the examples furnished in chapter xviii. on the "Notis" or marks by which "the trewe Kirk is decernit fra the false," where the old church is designated the "pestilent synagoge," "the filthie synagogue," and "the horrible harlot, the kirk malignant"[142]—the last words no doubt meant as a translation of the Vulgate rendering of Psalm xxvi. 5, ecclesiam malignantium,[143] translated "the ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... work. Assuredly, somewhere back in her life, something had gone amiss with this silly, helpful creature, and left a taint on her brain. The hearty, pretty smile would go suddenly from her face, something foreign looking out of it, instead, as if a pestilent thought had got into her soul; she would rise uneasily, going to the window, looking out, her forehead leaning on the glass, her body twitching weakly. One would think from her face she saw some work in the world which God had forgotten. What could it ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... That many who sought to do some little to repair the social wrongs, inflicted in the way of preventible sickness and death upon the poor, were strengthening those wrongs, however innocently, by wasting money on pestilent knaves cumbering society. That imagination, - soberly following one of these knaves into his life of punishment in jail, and comparing it with the life of one of these poor in a cholera- stricken alley, ...
— Reprinted Pieces • Charles Dickens
... on festal days I may go as far as a sprinkling of salt. My drink is the crystal spring; and this threadbare cloak is better than your gay robes. Gold—I value it no higher than pebbles on the beach. What brought me was concern for you; I would not have you ruined by this same pestilent wealth, this temptation for plunderers; many is the man it has sunk in helpless misery. Take my advice, and fling it bodily into the sea; a good man, to whom the wealth of philosophy is revealed, has no need of the other. It does not matter ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... whilst I took comfort at what she said and arose in the morning well, to the great satisfaction of my people. By-and-by the old woman came in, chopfallen, and said to me, 'O my son, do not ask how I have fared with her! When I opened the subject to her, she said to me, "An thou leave not this talk, pestilent hag that thou art, I will assuredly use thee as thou deserves!" But needs must I have at her again.' When I heard this, it added sickness to my sickness: but after some days, the old woman came again and said to me, 'O my son, I must have ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I • Anonymous
... besides great bunches of half-ripened bananas. Live chickens were kept under the bed in one of these rooms. The fruit which is ripened in these places is sold daily in every section of the city, and people who live with healthful surroundings, far away from this pestilent hole, are risking the health of themselves and their children, unwittingly, by purchasing fruit that cannot help but have absorbed something of the poison from the atmosphere of these filthy, crowded quarters. The Board of Health know about this place, for their ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... came sweeping down the Gulf like a rush of mad spirits; tore up the white crests of the sea and flung them on the beach in thundering surf; burst through the heavy fog that had trailed upon the moon's track and smothered the island in its soft pestilent brooding; and in one mighty pouring out of cold pure ether changed earth and sky from torrid ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 5, March, 1858 • Various
... the door against your return. You see I am selfish enough to look for another visit, though this pestilent hole is no place for you to visit. Howe will do nothing. When he was in command at New York our men literally rotted in the foul prison hulks lying in the harbour. It is a cheap and an easy way for killing ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... inspired by the wine he had drunk: "are you aware, that should I agree to your proposal, every other member of her family will be put to death before your eyes —her brother, her old father, and every pestilent royalist we ...
— La Vendee • Anthony Trollope
... will tend to teach you all this, more than any other method, and above all it will prevent you from falling into the pestilent habit of sponging to get texture; a trick which has nearly ruined our modern water-color school of art. There are sometimes places in which a skillful artist will roughen his paper a little to get certain conditions of dusty color with more ease than ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... blind and tremendous. Since the world is not the abode of unmixed integrity, he looks upon it as a den of thieves; since its institutions may obstruct the advancement of worth, and screen delinquency from punishment, he regards the social union as a pestilent nuisance, the mischiefs of which it is fitting that he in his degree should do his best to repair, by means however violent. Revenge is the mainspring of his conduct; but he ennobles it in his own eyes, by giving it the colour of a disinterested concern for the maintenance of justice,—the ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... christlichen Adel" (Werke, x. 574, June 1520). His proposition, Haereticos comburi esse contra voluntatem spiritus, was one of those condemned by Leo X. as pestilent, scandalous, and ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... with all its electricity. Thompson took advantage of my helpless condition, and carried me off unresisting to a place which railways can never reach, and where there is nothing to attract fashionable travellers. The surly Atlantic keeps watch over it and growls off the pestilent crowd of excursionists who bring uncleanness and greediness in their train, and are pursued by the land-sharks who prey upon such frivolous flying-fish. A little town, whose life stands still, or rather goes backward, whose ships have sailed away to other ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... bustle, and with unmoved calmness, she would superintend the preparation of food for a thousand men, and assist in feeding them herself. Just so she moved amidst the flying bullets upon the field, bringing succor to the wounded; or through the hospitals amidst the pestilent air of the fever-stricken wards. Self-controlled, she could control others, and order and symmetry sprung up before her as a natural result of the operation of ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... willing to work for him at a moment's notice. He would have declared that no man in Ireland was on better terms with his tenantry than he; and now, because there had been a quarrel between him and that pestilent fellow Carroll,—whom he had been willing to buy out from his bit of land and let him go to America, so that they might all be at peace,—could they all have turned against him and taken Carroll's part? As far as he had been able to gather ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... more or less formidable to human life. In the same spirit, every experiment in civilisation has passed for a crime among those engaged in some other experiment. The foreigner has seemed an insidious rascal, the heretic a pestilent sinner, and any material obstacle a literal devil; while to possess some unusual passion, however innocent, has brought obloquy on every one unfortunate enough not to be constituted like the average ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... elbow of a Saturday, under the semblance of a wealthy member of my congregation. It were a great blessing, if every particular of what in the sum we call popular sentiment could carry about the name of its manufacturer stamped legibly upon it. I gave a stab under the fifth rib to that pestilent fallacy,—'Our country, right or wrong,'—by tracing its original to a speech of Ensign Cilley at a dinner of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... the London train upon the morrow From holiday delights he gets release, Conspuing, more in anger than in sorrow, The pestilent ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 30, 1919 • Various
... trouble and uneasiness. I should rather say that they alone cause us any; for as for the rest, what with their drowsiness, their plethora, their folly, and their vanity, they are doing us anything but mischief. These fellows are a pestilent set of heretics, whom we would gladly see burnt; they are, with the most untiring perseverance, and in spite of divers minatory declarations of the holy father, scattering their books abroad through ...
— Isopel Berners - The History of certain doings in a Staffordshire Dingle, July, 1825 • George Borrow
... that many seeming goods are withheld, because they are evils in disguise; and many seeming ills allowed, because they are masqueraded blessings; and demonstrating, as in this strange tale, that the unrighteous Mammon is a cruel master, a foul tempter, a pestilent destroyer of all peace, and a teeming source of ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... pretty author, and a pretty cause he advocates,—I thank God there are no schools and no printing presses in this colony, nor are like to be,—and a courageous Surveyor-General to keep by him such pestilent stuff in the present year of grace. 'Abuses Stript and Whipt,' 'Anglia Rediva,' 'Diary of Nehemiah Wallington,' 'Bastwick's Litany!' Miles Carrington, Miles Carrington! I have my eye on thee! Thou hadst need to walk warily! 'Zion's Plea against Prelacy,' damnation! ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... the heart; that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, 'Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!'" But whatever this "most pestilent of hoary sinners" may have been in the past, it has, through its Lord Chancellor's Visitors, performed its duty towards its "worn-out lunatics," not only "in every mad-house," but in many a home in which they enjoy as much liberty as possible, while the property of which they are ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... followed his precipitate logic. With woman's well-known aversion from the abstract, she was concentrating her attention on the concrete case, the glorious animal before her. Now it would be very wrong to suppose that Hardy was in the least tainted with socialism, anarchism, or any such pestilent heresies, or that he had read "Emile" and "Walden." He had never heard of either of these works, and had no desire whatever for the restoration of society on a primitive basis of animalism, modified by light literature, clothing, and the moral ...
— Audrey Craven • May Sinclair
... first subsist by toil, and in the midst of difficulties, the defects of their situation are supplied by industry: and while dry, tempting, and healthful lands are left uncultivated, [Footnote: Compare the state of Hungary with that of Holland.] the pestilent marsh is drained with great labour, and the sea is fenced off with mighty barriers, the materials and the costs of which, the soil to be gained can scarcely afford, or repay. Harbours are opened, and crowded with shipping, where vessels of burden, if they are not constructed with a view to the ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... one— The extremes of too much faith and none— Till, betwixt ancient trash and new, 'Twixt Cant and Blasphemy—the two Rank ills with which this age is curst— We can no more tell which is worst, Than erst could Egypt, when so rich In various plagues, determine which She thought most pestilent and vile, Her frogs, like Benbow and Carlisle, Croaking their native mud-notes loud, Or her fat locusts, like a cloud Of pluralists, obesely lowering, At once benighting ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... judge me by that rule. Carolinians, sir, always appreciate intelligent strangers, for they always exert a healthy influence, and never meddle with our institutions; so you see it wouldn't do to follow the pestilent notions of petty scribblers, lest we ...
— Manuel Pereira • F. C. Adams
... one doctor even looked at her; the sick soldiers, whom she had tended as long as she could keep on her legs, in their turn got up from their pestilent litters to lift a few drops of water in the hollow of a broken pot to ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... under heaven, did it seem for a lawsuit to make any progress, while Matthew Fabens was Justice of the Peace, in Summerfield. Pestilent Tilly was always scheming to provoke such evils, and was always threatening his neighbors with a lawsuit. Sometimes he would come post-haste for a warrant, or summons, or attachment; again, he would be in hot distress ...
— Summerfield - or, Life on a Farm • Day Kellogg Lee
... the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires, with a syren sweetness, drawing the mind to the serpent's tail of sinful fancies; and herein, especially, comedies give the largest field to ear, as Chaucer saith; how, both in other nations and ours, before poets did soften us, we were full of courage, ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... a favourite. I well-nigh lost mine office, because one frosty morning Master Varney thought I smelled of aqua vitae; and this fellow can appear before him drunk as a wineskin, and yet meet no rebuke. But then he is a pestilent clever fellow withal, and no one can understand above one half of what ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... was of no use to work on his farm; it was the most pestilent little piece of ground in the whole country; everything about it went wrong, in spite of him. His fences were continually falling to pieces; his cow would either go astray, or get among the cabbages; weeds were sure to grow quicker in his fields than anywhere else; the rain always ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... parliaments; yea, to impose taxes arbitrarily, and grant odious monopolies: for the State was his, to be managed as a man would manage a farm; and those who resisted this encroachment on the liberties of the nation were to be fined, imprisoned, executed, as pestilent disturbers of the public peace. He would form dangerous alliances with Catholic powers, marry his children to Catholic princes, appoint Catholics to high office, and compromise the dignity of the nation as a Protestant State. His ministers, his judges, his high officials were simply his tools, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VIII • John Lord
... sensation. For the rest it would be strange, certainly, if the race did not show an improvement. In your day, riches debauched one class with idleness of mind and body, while poverty sapped the vitality of the masses by overwork, bad food, and pestilent homes. The labor required of children, and the burdens laid on women, enfeebled the very springs of life. Instead of these maleficent circumstances, all now enjoy the most favorable conditions of physical life; the young are carefully nurtured ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... and Hans Schewitzer, a German Lutheran, were brought up for sentence and condemned, being pestilent and naughty heretics, to ...
— In the Days of Drake • J. S. Fletcher
... de la Doctrine Chretienne" have been shot by their fellow-Christians of the Commune. A friend of mine saw Madame Milliere in a prisoners' gang, and we have authentic intelligence to-day that her husband, one of the most pestilent of the apostles of Fraternity and ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... Inhabited, though sinless, more then now, 690 Avoided pinching cold and scorching heate? These changes in the Heav'ns, though slow, produc'd Like change on Sea and Land, sideral blast, Vapour, and Mist, and Exhalation hot, Corrupt and Pestilent: Now from the North Of Norumbega, and the Samoed shoar Bursting thir brazen Dungeon, armd with ice And snow and haile and stormie gust and flaw, Boreas and Caecias and Argestes loud And Thrascias rend the Woods and Seas upturn; 700 With adverse ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... scapegoat of the nations, had poisoned the wells and brought on the Black Death, had pierced the host, killed children for their blood, blasphemed the saints, and done all that the imagination of defalcating debtors could suggest. But the Roman Jews were merely pestilent heretics. Perhaps it was the comparative poverty of the Ghetto that made its tragedy one of steady degradation rather than of fitful massacre. Nevertheless bloodshed was not unknown, and the song died on Rachel's lips, though the ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... pestilent wit which blights whatever it touches, are not distinctively American. It is because we are a humorous rather than a witty people that we laugh for the most part with, and not at, our fellow creatures. Indeed, judged by the unpleasant things we might say and do not say, we should be esteemed ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... year in the villages of Atures and Maypures, around the two Great Cataracts of the Orinoco, render these spots highly dangerous to European travellers. They are caused by violent heats, in combination with the excessive humidity of the air, bad nutriment, and, if we may believe the natives, the pestilent exhalations rising from the bare rocks of the Raudales. These fevers of the Orinoco appeared to us to resemble those which prevail every year between New Barcelona, La Guayra, and Porto Cabello, in the vicinity of the sea; and which often degenerate into adynamic fevers. "I have had my little ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the appointment of a commission, consisting of Bonner, Thirlby, and twenty other peers, gentlemen, and canon lawyers, on whom the court could rely. "Wicked persons" had invented slanders against the queen's person, and had sown "pestilent heresies" in the realm. The queen, therefore, "minding to punish such enormities," and having especial trust in the wisdom of these persons, gave them power to institute inquiries at their pleasure into the conduct ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... human experience; and even Grendel, the fiend of the marshes, was, we can clearly see, for the poet of Beowulf a figure profoundly and generally accepted as not only true but real; what, indeed, can be more real for poetry than a devouring fiend which lives in pestilent fens? And the reason why epic poetry so imperiously demands reality of subject is clear; it is because such poetry has symbolically to re-create the actual fact and the actual particulars of human existence ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie
... said that the abstract Utilitarian doctrine reached its high-water mark in Mill's book on the Subjection of Women, to which Mr. Stephen allots one section of a chapter. The book is a particular enlargement upon Mill's general view that it is a pestilent error to regard such marked distinctions of human character as sex or race as innate and in the main indelible. What is called the nature of women he treats as an artificial thing, an isolated fact which need not at any ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... How, foul and pestilent discovery, Didst thou find place within the human heart? Through thee is martial glory lost, through thee The trade of arms became a worthless art: And at such ebb are worth and chivalry, That the base often plays the better part. Through thee no more shall ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... contain no traces of that delight in brilliant sunshine which most Northerners feel, nor of that wonder at the beauties of the firmament which was so real to Homer. He frequently remarks that the weather was pestilent, that the winds blew and ceased not, that the sea was detestably rough and the clouds everlasting; but of the praise which accompanies enjoyment there is scarcely a word. His utmost is to say that the climate of a place is salubrious. ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen
... be suppressed: it will be folly to expect peace or tranquillity while that pestilent body is in existence; smite it "hip and thigh," and you at once cut off the fruitful sources of discontent and crime. Stop the rent, and at one blow you annihilate the profligate press, which turns the minds of the people from their legitimate avocations, which panders to their prejudices, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... nations?" However, the rulers of the Church grew more and more alarmed at the circulation of the book. At length Archbishop Arundel, a zealous but not very learned prelate, complained to the Pope of "that pestilent wretch, John Wycliffe, the son of the old Serpent, the forerunner of Antichrist, who had completed his iniquity by inventing a new translation of the Scriptures"; and, shortly after, the Convocation of Canterbury forbade such translations, under ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... he who made that famous soliloquy on life, who gave the advice to the players, who thought "this goodly frame, the earth, a steril promontory, and this brave o'er-hanging firmament, the air, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours;" whom "man delighted not, nor woman neither;" he who talked with the grave-diggers, and moralised on Yorick's skull; the school-fellow of Rosencrans and Guildenstern at Wittenberg; the friend of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... that in Oldport we all incline to the attitude of repose. Now and then a man comes here, from farther east, with the New England fever in his blood, and with a pestilent desire to do something. You hear of him, presently, proposing that the Town Hall should be repainted. Opposition would require too much effort, and the thing is done. But the Gulf Stream soon takes its revenge on the intruder, and gradually repaints him also, with its own ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... cried. "'Tis our Tess and Dot—and Sammy Pinkney, the little scamp! It must be either his bulldog or old Tom Jonah those pestilent men have caught." ...
— The Corner House Girls Growing Up - What Happened First, What Came Next. And How It Ended • Grace Brooks Hill
... wrongest-headed and most mischievous journal in the world. People try to treat it as a negligible quantity when they disagree with it. But I have seen as much of the surface of the country and as much of its people as most men, and I have found the pestilent print everywhere, and everywhere have found it influential. For some time past it has been telling blood-curdling stories of the iniquities of prison rule in Tasmania, with the tacit conclusion that nothing ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... pestilent mosquito do his worst Till he burst, Let him bore and burrow, morning, noon, and night, If he finds the diet sweet, oh, Who am I to place a veto On the pestilent mosquito?— Let ...
— Rhymes of the East and Re-collected Verses • John Kendall (AKA Dum-Dum)
... is entertaining, and I will prophesy that Gaul will move in our time, and that the movement will be directed against the pestilent humbug of ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculty!... And yet, to me, what ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... them say," answered Robin, looking at Mr Rose, "I may thank you for that. Taking me with you, and standing close by you, they counted me a very pestilent heretic, and ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... sensible what he had done, And fain he would have his new guest to be gone; But now 'twas too late to bid him turn out, A well rooted possession already was got. The old trees decay'd, and in their room grew A stubborn, pestilent, poisonous crew. The master, who first the young brood had admitted, They stung like ingrates, and left him unpitied. No help from manuring or planting was found, The ill weeds had eat out the heart of the ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... the other boys saw Hook in the water striking wildly for the ship; no elation on his pestilent face now, only white fear, for the crocodile was in dogged pursuit of him. On ordinary occasions the boys would have swum alongside cheering; but now they were uneasy, for they had lost both Peter and Wendy, and were scouring the lagoon for ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... of the same forests into his owne hands, appointed a punishment to be executed vpon all such offendors; namelie, to haue their eies put out. And to bring the greater number of men in danger of those his penall lawes (a pestilent policie of a spitefull mind, and sauoring altogither of his French slauerie) he deuised meanes how to bred, nourish, and increase the multitude of dere, and also to make roome for them in that part of the realme which lieth ...
— Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland (2 of 6): England (1 of 12) - William the Conqueror • Raphael Holinshed
... upon and listened to with impatience. The time for Border feud and skirmish was already well-nigh past. Industry and knowledge and the pacific arts of life were making progress. The moss-trooper was already becoming an anachronism and a pestilent nuisance, to be put down by the relentless arm of the law, before the Union of the Crowns. Half a century or more before that event, this opinion had been formed of the reiving clans by their quieter and more thoughtful neighbours, as is manifest ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... suddenly a bitter and unfounded reproach escapes him. England is responsible for his having become faithless to his monastic vows, 'for no other reason do I hate Britain more than for this, though it has always been pestilent ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... your men are down there associatin' with the most pestilent set of robbers and land-pirates that ever disgraced a civilized country," announced the Colonel. "They robbed me of fifteen thousand dollars and left me marooned here on this desert island, but the wind of Providence blew 'em back, and the devil wouldn't have 'em in Tophet, and here they are. ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... been lately? I had one fiery night when this same dragon "tic" held me for some hours with pestilent violence. It still comes at intervals with abated fury. Owing to this and broken sleep, I am looking singularly charming, one of my true London looks—starved out and worn down. Write soon, ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... do maintain that if we go on multiplying Universities we shall not increase the joy; that the reign of two-penny saints lies not far off and will soon lie within measurable distance; and that it will be a pestilent reign. As we saw in out last lecture the word 'University'—Universitas—had, in its origin, nothing to do with Universality: it meant no more than a Society, organised (as it happened) to promote learning. ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... he heard the phrase across the floor, "What the devil are you saying?" and stopped as if the heavens and the earth must refuse to go round on their axes because of this introduction into Parliament of the negligences of private conversation. Mr. Gibbs—a very pestilent and very empty member of the young army of silly obstructives—moved that the words be taken down—an ancient formula not heard of for years till the present Session, when everything is turned to account for the purpose of occupying ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... fashion-plate—a doll, powdered, perhaps, and painted, laced up, and perfumed and clothed in dainty raiment, to come and make discord in her father's home! It was intolerable. Why did not Brooke leave this pestilent creature in her own abode, with the insolent, aristocratic friends who had done their best already to ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... the building of hundreds of houses and the furnishing of them down to the last center table, they will not recall the rebuilding of the entire P. R. R., nor scores of little items like $43,000 a year merely for oil and negroes to pump it on the pestilent mosquito, the thousand and one little things so essential to the success of the enterprise yet that leave not a trace behind. Greater perhaps than the building of the canal is the accomplishment of the United States in showing the natives how life can be lived safely and healthily in ...
— Zone Policeman 88 - A Close Range Study of the Panama Canal and its Workers • Harry A. Franck
... When the Vicar spoke of the lasting injury to the Vicarage, and when Lord Trowbridge remembered that he owned two thousand and two acres within the parish,—as Mr. Puddleham had told him,—he began to think that the chapel had better be built elsewhere. The Vicar was a pestilent man to whom punishment was due, but the punishment should be made to attach itself to the man, rather than to the man's office. So was working the Marquis's mind, till the Marquis came upon that horrid passage ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... a child of perdition—an impious and pestilent heretic! Thou eatest and drinkest damnation to thyself; and the Holy Church consigns all such to the flames, and to the fire of eternal wrath hereafter!" roared the infuriate priest, whose choler waxed ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... was the first of Edison's masters, and perhaps his fellows, who appreciated him. Mediocrity had only seen the gawky stripling, with his moonstruck air, and pestilent habit of trying some new crotchet. Himself an inventor, Milliken recognised in his deep-set eye and musing brow the fire of a suppressed genius. He was then just twenty-one. The friendship of Mr. Milliken, and the ...
— Heroes of the Telegraph • J. Munro
... "This man is a pestilent fellow," said the community. "He troubles us overmuch with this vision that he has knowledge of. Come, ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... to have had a pretty good idea of diphtheria. He speaks of it in connection with other throat manifestations under the heading of "crusty and pestilent ulcers of the tonsils." He divides the anginas generally into four kinds. The first consists of inflammation of the fauces with the classic symptoms, the second presents no inflammation of the mouth nor ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... had done no service in the late campaigns by reason of his age, he still longed for the command in a distant war beyond the seas. While Sulla was with the army completing some matters that still remained to be finished, Marius kept at home and hatched that most pestilent faction which did more mischief to Rome than all her wars; and indeed the deity[189] showed by signs what was coming. Fire spontaneously blazed from the wooden shafts which supported the military standards, and was quenched with difficulty; and three crows brought their young into ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... greens turned blues, Of lustres with so evanescent a sheen Their colours are felt, but never seen. Strange winged dragons writhe about These vases, poisoned venoms spout, Impregnate with old Chinese charms; Sealed urns containing mortal harms, They fill the mind with thoughts impure, Pestilent drippings from the ure Of vicious thinkings. "Ah, I see," Said I, "you deal in pottery." The old man turned and looked at me. Shook his head gently. ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... course The steam makes head, Benacus then no more They call the name, but Mincius, till at last Reaching Governo into Po he falls. Not far his course hath run, when a wide flat It finds, which overstretchmg as a marsh It covers, pestilent in summer oft. Hence journeying, the savage maiden saw 'Midst of the fen a territory waste And naked of inhabitants. To shun All human converse, here she with her slaves Plying her arts remain'd, and liv'd, and left Her body tenantless. Thenceforth the tribes, Who round were scatter'd, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... mind Mr. Eagles's letter is. Such letters always bring me to think of Harriet Martineau's pestilent plan of doing to destruction half of the intellectual life of the world, by suppressing every mental breath breathed through the post office. She was not in a state of clairvoyance when she said such a thing. I have not heard from her, but you observed what the 'Critic' said of ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... Minister. Close time? Fudge! The Hares were intended at last to perish Either by sounding gun or the gaping jaws of the greyhound. Food for the people? Cant! The promotion of Sport is the purpose Plain of this pestilent Bill, which neutralises the victory Won, with much labour, by Me, my gift to the sons of the furrow. DAWNAY talks as though the Hare were a "domiciled animal." Shows what a deal he knows of Hares—save the pleasure of killing 'em. Shall I give the nourishing farmers up to this pillage? ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 18, 1891 • Various
... the Middle Ages, such persons as were afflicted by pestilent diseases were declared contaminated by the devil, and carried to churches and chapels, a dozen at a time, securely bound together. They were thrown upon the floor, where they lay, according to the attestation of a pitying chronicler, until dead ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... reach the Tennessee river, thence along the course of that stream, turning northwardly to the Ohio, or more properly, perhaps, to the southern line of Kentucky, we exclude the most pestilent portion of Tennessee, of which Memphis is the capital, and retain the middle and eastern parts, along with Eastern Kentucky and Western Virginia. Thence passing westward with the southern line of Missouri to the Indian Territory, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Volume V. Issue I • Various
... witchcraft, wherein the lewde dealing of witches and witchmongers is notablie detected, the knauerie of coniurors, the impietie of inchantors, the follie of soothsaiers, the impudent falshood of cousenors, the infidelitie of atheists, the pestilent practises of Pythonists, the curiositie of figurecasters, the vanitie of dreamers, the beggerlie art of Alcumystrie, the abhomination of idolatrie, the horrible art of poisoning, the vertue and power of naturall magike, and all the conueiances ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... vniuersity pen plaies well; they smell too much of that writer Ouid, and that writer Metamorphosis,[xi:1] and talke too much of Proserpina and Juppiter. Why, heres our fellow Shakespeare puts them all downe, I,[xi:2] and Ben Jonson too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow! he brought vp Horace giuing the Poets a pill,[xi:3] but our fellow Shakespeare hath giuen him a purge that made him ...
— Kemps Nine Daies Wonder - Performed in a Daunce from London to Norwich • William Kemp
... unpleasant for any man to say anything which he sincerely, and after due deliberation, believes, is, to my mind, a proposition of the most profoundly immoral character. I verily believe that the great good which has been effected in the world by Christianity has been largely counteracted by the pestilent doctrine on which all the Churches have insisted, that honest disbelief in their more or less astonishing creeds is a moral offence, indeed a sin of the deepest dye, deserving and involving the same future retribution ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... He needs additional land and, had he not acted as he has done, I would have given him some land elsewhere for nothing; but, as it is, the pestilent fellow has taken it into ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... weighty, the most cursed and perverse sect of Mahoma had begun, through its followers and disciples, to spread and scatter through some of the islands of this archipelago its pestilent and abominable creed; but the true God was pleased at that time to bring the Spanish people into these islands, which was a cure and remedy for the mortal sickness which the said Mahometan sect has already ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume X, 1597-1599 • E. H. Blair
... that Far Eastern port, picking up volunteers for the Western Front. The port contributed a goodly number, but there remained one berth vacant. The long-suffering Consul had a stroke of inspiration. Here was a means of at once swelling the man-power of his country and ridding himself of a pestilent ne'er-do-well. His boys, searching far and wide, discovered John Fanshawe in the back premises of a Malay go-down, oblivious to all things, and bore ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 16, 1919 • Various
... from their usual colour gave more than once "fatal premonition" of coming misfortunes during the great civil wars; and Bacon mentions a tradition that "if the oak-apple, broken, be full of worms, it is a sign of a pestilent year." In olden times the decay of the bay-tree was considered an omen of disaster, and it is stated that, previous to the death of Nero, though the winter was very mild, all these trees withered to the roots, and that a great pestilence in Padua was preceded by the same phenomenon. [2] Shakespeare ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... in his anger is shown by the fact that, as he had foreseen, he reaped all the odium of Mann's conversion. The Bishop of Cordoba in Council branded him as "a dangerous, pestilent person, who under the pretence of selling the Scriptures went about making converts, and moreover employed subordinates for the purpose of deluding weak and silly people into separation from the Mother ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... eats pickled pig's feet at midnight or drinks unlimited whisky, even a silk or cotton nightcap may not consign him to the arms of Morpheus; but it may work wonders for a sober person who is cursed with the pestilent habit of conjuring up all manner or odd fancies when his head touches the pillow, instead of dismissing the workmen who hammer on the forges of the brain. The majority of the men will rather suffer nocturnal horrors than be laughed at for wearing ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... deserted the front parlour; for there had come there a pestilent fellow, highly connected with the Press, as the lamp-maker declared, but employed as an assistant shorthand-writer somewhere about the Houses of Parliament, according to the silversmith, who greatly ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... understanding that he was not at any rate to be expected home on that night. He had business on hand of great importance, which, as he declared, made his presence in town imperative. Mr. Trigger, from Percycross, was to be up with reference to the pestilent petition which had been presented against the return of Griffenbottom and himself. Moggs had petitioned on his own behalf, and two of the Liberals of the borough had also petitioned in the interest of Mr. Westmacott. ...
— Ralph the Heir • Anthony Trollope
... insalubrity; unhealthiness &c. Adj.; nonnaturals[obs3]; plague spot; malaria &c. (poison) 663; death in the pot, contagion; toxicity. Adj. insalubrious; unhealthy, unwholesome; noxious, noisome; morbific[obs3], morbiferous[obs3]; mephitic, septic, azotic[obs3], deleterious; pestilent, pestiferous, pestilential; virulent, venomous, envenomed; poisonous, toxic, toxiferous[obs3], teratogenic; narcotic. contagious, infectious, catching, taking, epidemic, zymotic[obs3]; epizootic. innutritious[obs3], indigestible, ungenial; uncongenial &c. (disagreeing) 24. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... small-pox because they could find no description of it in the immortal works of Galen. The causes seemed to be uncleanliness, gluttony, immoderate drinking, and also severe inundations leaving decaying vegetation. Richmond's army has been considered a factor in the germination of the seeds of pestilent disorder which broke out soon after in the camps of Litchfield, and on the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... cried cheerfully. "'Art a late bird, as usual, and I am at that pestilent task the rehearsal ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... cursed your interesting river. Don't write to me about it again. Don't look at it again. Why did you bring up the subject? I beg your pardon; I had no right to say that. Let me be polite; let me be hospitable. I beg to invite you to come and see me, when my room is purified from its pestilent smell. I can only offer you a cup of tea. Oh, that river, that river, what devil set me talking about it? I'm not mad, Mr. Roylake; only wretched. When may I expect you? Choose ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... important is a college play, entitled "The Return from Parnassus," dating 1601-02. In it a much-quoted passage makes Burbage, as a character, declare: "Why here's our fellow Shakespeare puts them all down; aye and Ben Jonson, too. O that Ben Jonson is a pestilent fellow; he brought up Horace, giving the poets a pill, but our fellow Shakespeare hath given him a purge that made him bewray his credit." Was Shakespeare then concerned in this war of the stages? And ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... answered the other, "are that he is to be kept in this cabin until we have finally disposed of these three pestilent English ships; and when that is done, and we have captured them, he is to be locked up in the fore hold, with the other prisoners we shall take—if the rascals do not in this case fight to the death, as they often do. Then when we return ...
— Across the Spanish Main - A Tale of the Sea in the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... in a cathedral, and what not),—while the public was put to the inconvenience of which we had a specimen every afternoon when the office was busy, and which we knew to be quite monstrous. That, perhaps, in short, this Prerogative Office of the diocese of Canterbury was altogether such a pestilent job, and such a pernicious absurdity, that but for its being squeezed away in a corner of St. Paul's Churchyard, which few people knew, it must have been turned completely inside out, and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... flatter him was to try to deceive him. In 1604, there was in Oxford a certain Richard Haydock, a Bachelor of Physic. This Haydock practised his profession during the day like other mortals, but varied from the kindly race of men by a pestilent habit of preaching all night. It was Haydock's contention that he preached unconsciously in his sleep, when he would give out a text with the greatest gravity, and declare such sacred matters as were revealed to him in slumber, "his preaching coming by revelation." Though people ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... thy steadfast truth the sand Of men and time and circumstance dost sway! The slave-cloud dwindles on this golden day, And over all the pestilent southern land, Breathless, the dark expectant millions stand, To watch the northern sun rise on its way, Cleaving the stormy distance—every ray Sword-bright, sword-sharp, in God's ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... live ten thousand centuries! Ah! this way you mortals have of dying out at three score years and ten, is but a craven habit. So, Babbalanja! may you never die. Yoomy! my sweet poet, may you live to sing to me in Paradise. Ha, ha! would that we floated in this glorious stuff, instead of this pestilent brine.—Hark ye! were I to make a Mardi now, I'd have every continent a huge haunch of venison; every ocean a wine-vat! I'd stock every cavern with choice old spirits, and make three surplus suns to ripen the grapes all the year round. ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... swifts, untirable on their wings, but too gentle to hold their own in a jostling crowd, soared away after the midges and May-flies and pestilent gnats that rise from marsh and pond to hold their joyous dances under the blue dome. Continually rushing open-mouthed after these, they have stretched their gape from ear to ear; but their bills have dwindled by disuse and left only an apology for ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... near Argos, were infested by great numbers of serpents, which, as fast as they were destroyed, were replaced by new swarms; draining the marshes, and, probably, setting fire to the adjacent thickets or jungles, he destroyed these pestilent reptiles, on which it was fabled that he had destroyed the Hydra of Lerna, with its heads, which grew as fast as they were cut off. The forest of Erymanthus was full of wild boars, which laid waste all the neighbouring country: he destroyed them all, and brought one with him ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... might be still behind her, but now that we know she is behind us, everything is safe. She is our game. We will hang her. You shall hang her yourself. No one has so well earned the privilege of abolishing this pestilent limb of Satan." ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... these letters are found to contain much alarming matter, strange expressions about subsidies from France, allusions to a vast scheme which would "give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it had ever received," and which "would utterly subdue a pestilent heresy." It was natural that those who saw these expressions, in letters which had been overlooked, should suspect that there was some horrible villainy in those which had been carefully destroyed. Such was the feeling of the House of Commons: "Question, question, Coleman's letters!" ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... must wait till Murray's is finished. He is making a tour in Middlesex, and is to return soon, when high matter may be expected. He wants to have it in quarto, which is a cursed unsaleable size; but it is pestilent long, and one ...
— A Publisher and His Friends • Samuel Smiles
... was reborn in his mind. He saw her in all the majesty of her marvelous body, just as when she was dancing or leaping from side to side of the old salon. And now this form, molded by nature in a moment of enthusiasm, was no longer in existence.... It was nothing but a mass of liquid flesh and pestilent pulp!... ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... attained at so great a sacrifice of taste? Their model must have been a toad with a stick thrust through it (three of which, so impaled and hung up in the sun to dry, Luther recommended as the best cure for all manner of "pestilent humors"). At any rate, the difference between their aspect and that of the sail-boat is that of a beetle and a butterfly. The acme of ugliness is reached in the freight ferry-boats, floating fragments of railroad, whose cars look like the joints of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... you would think there must be a brave supper cooking in the great bowels below. Sea fowls are pecking at the small crabs, shell-fish, and other sea candies and maccaroni, which the Right Whale sometimes carries on his pestilent back. And all the while the thick-lipped leviathan is rushing through the deep, leaving tons of tumultuous white curds in his wake, and causing the slight boat to rock in the swells like a skiff caught nigh the paddle-wheels of an ocean ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... spot; malaria &c (poison) 663; death in the pot, contagion; toxicity. Adj. insalubrious; unhealthy, unwholesome; noxious, noisome; morbific^, morbiferous^; mephitic, septic, azotic^, deleterious; pestilent, pestiferous, pestilential; virulent, venomous, envenomed; poisonous, toxic, toxiferous^, teratogenic; narcotic. contagious, infectious, catching, taking, epidemic, zymotic^; epizootic. innutritious^, indigestible, ungenial; uncongenial &c (disagreeing) ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... with sordid deaths, and the very cost of their burial would have come from the pockets of pinched workers. I fancy that I have shown the advisability of neglecting strict economic canons in this instance. I abhor the pestilent beings who swarm in certain quarters, and I should never dream of removing any burden from their shoulders if I thought that it would only leave the rascals with more money to expend on brutish pleasures; ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... aught, which thou desiredst chaste and untouched,—thou 'lt preserve for me the chastity of my boy. I do not say from the public: I fear those naught who hurry along the thoroughfares hither thither occupied on their own business: truth my fear is from thee and thy penis, pestilent eke to fair and to foul. Set it in motion where thou dost please, whenever thou biddest, as much as thou wishest, wherever thou findest the opportunity out of doors: this one object I except, to my thought a reasonable boon. But if thy evil mind and senseless rutting push thee forward, ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... the best of comrades, and he has fine qualities and plenty of courage. But there are times when I fear he will be his own undoing. When he disputes in the schools he will often tread perilously near some 'pestilent heresy,' as the masters would deem it, or show by some of his arguments that he has a dangerous knowledge of forbidden books. Just now things are quiet in Oxford, and not much notice is taken. But who knows how long the calm may last? London has been set in a commotion ...
— For the Faith • Evelyn Everett-Green
... 'pestilent heretic' helped thee to it, I reckon!" replied the guest laughing. "Ay, Robin, this is he thou knewest of old time. We will fight out our duello another time, lad. I am rare glad ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... instance a beautiful and significant example of that loyal and loving fidelity to the minor passing suggestions of Chaucer's text which on all possible occasions of such comparison so markedly and vividly distinguishes the work of Shakespeare's from the work of Fletcher's hand. Of the pestilent abuse and perversion to which Fletcher has put the perhaps already superfluous hints or sketches by Shakespeare for an episodical underplot, in his transmutation of Palamon's love-stricken and luckless deliverer into the disgusting ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... go in search of the general, leaving the ship and a considerable part of the men till the return of the general, who had vowed he would return again to the straits. Hearing of this determination, two pestilent fellows, named Charles Parker and Edward Smith, secretly represented to the men, that the captain and master meant to leave them to be devoured by cannibals, and had no intention to come back; on which the whole company ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... make a clever invention he would not be able to raise the necessary fees for a patent, or to get any one to help him thereto. The manufacturer "makes what his customers call for." Why should he spend his money and spoil his plant to introduce improvements? So things go, until some pestilent Yankees flood the markets with better articles at a lower price; and British consumers suddenly discover that they want something that the native manufacturer cannot make. The need was there; but invention did not follow. How happened it that the American manufacturer ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... nail he had fixed in the heel of his shoe, while he held by the horse's tail for a bridle. "I swear by the eyes of my beautiful gold-fish," cried the prince, "but this is too bad!" And then he attempted to dislodge the pestilent imp, by thrusting his elbow into his back; but the little caitiff every time bounced up like a tennis-ball, and the next instant was in his seat, crying, "Ho-ho! ha-ha!" louder than ever. This time he was too cunning for the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 1 January 1848 • Various
... a week to Christmas. For many days the weather had been as bad as it can be even in London. Windows glimmered at noon with the sickly ray of gas or lamp; the roads were trodden into viscid foulness; all night the droppings of a pestilent rain were doleful upon the roof, and only the change from a black to a yellow sky told that the sun was risen. ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... the sun had doubtless inflamed his blood so that he became stupefied and unconscious. I went, therefore, for a barber that he should come and bleed my brother, and restore his senses to him. Now as ill-luck would have it the first barber I lighted upon was this pestilent fellow. When I found him he was engaged in shaving a customer, and because that customer was a good one he would not leave him to attend to my brother, but first finished his shaving and then came with me. Having first ...
— Tales of the Caliph • H. N. Crellin
... had hardly been inaugurated before it was disturbed by the pestilent pretension of State Rights, which, indeed, has never ceased to disturb it since. Discontent with the treaty between the United States and Great Britain, negotiated by that purest patriot, John Jay, under instructions from Washington, in 1794, aroused ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... raged at Chancellor Black. Each day his rage increased. It seemed as though there would never be an end to Doctor Gilman. The stone he had rejected had become the corner-stone of Stillwater. Whenever he opened a newspaper he felt like exclaiming: "Will no one rid me of this pestilent fellow?" For the "Rise and Fall," in an edition deluxe limited to two hundred copies, was being bought up by all his book-collecting millionaire friends; a popular edition was on view in the windows of every book-shop; ...
— The Red Cross Girl • Richard Harding Davis
... enough," returned Potts. "However, it may do. We will help you in the matter, good Humphrey Etcetera. You shall not be troubled with these pestilent witches much longer. The neighbourhood shall ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... great object was effectually attained. The wrongs of Napoleon, the cold cruelty of the English government, and the pestilent petty tyranny of Sir Hudson Lowe, were the perpetual themes of table-talk all over Europe. There were statesmen of high rank in either house of the British parliament, who periodically descanted on these topics—and the answers as often elicited from the ministers of the crown, only ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... said Mrs. Wesley coolly, "you have a pestilent habit of not listening. I hired you to row me to the Albemarle, and this, I believe, is she." Then, with a glance up at the half-dozen grinning faces above the bulwarks, "Can I ...
— Hetty Wesley • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... idol I say again. Consume it utterly, and scatter its ashes to the winds. Strip off the gaudes and tinsel in which you have decked your foolish May Queen. Have done with your senseless and profane mummeries; and dismiss your Robin Hoods, your Friar Tucks, and your Hobby-horses. Silence your pestilent minstrels, and depart peaceably to your own homes. Abandon your sinful courses, or assuredly 'the Lord will come upon you unawares, and cut you in sunder, and appoint ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 1 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth
... stale musty topics, without the smallest tincture of anything new, not only to the torment and nauseating of the Christian reader, but, if not suddenly prevented, to the universal spreading of that pestilent disease the lethargy in this island, whereas there is very little satire which has not something in it untouched before. The defects of the former are usually imputed to the want of invention among those who are dealers ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... know also, or perhaps you don't—in which case let me tell you—that my Cormorant has made her goodly name, ay, and brought her commander a fair share of his credit, by her energy in bringing to an incredible number of those d——d French sharks—beg pardon, but you know the pestilent breed. Well, we shall never agree upon the subject I fear. As for me, the smart of the salt air, the sting of the salt breeze, the fighting, the danger, they have got into my blood; and even now it sometimes comes over me that life will not be perfect life to me without the dancing ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... disposition, that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... the corrosives and vinegar which she thought suitable for the case; and the Earl was never weary in depicting the same statesmen as seditious, pestilent, self-seeking, mischief-making traitors. These secret, informal negotiations, had been carried on during most of the year 1587. It was the "comptroller's peace;", as Walsingham contemptuously designated the attempted treaty; ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sin.-Christ, as Advocate, pleads a bad cause.-A good cause will plead for itself.-A bad man may have a good cause, and a good man may have a bad cause.-Christ, the righteous, pleading a bad cause, is a mystery.-The best saints are most sensible of their sins.-A pestilent passage ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... nothing. 'To let the Austrians come in for the finishing stroke,—-Excellence, it will be to let them gain, in History, a glory which is of your earning. Daun and Austria, not Soltikof and Russia, will be said to have extinguished this pestilent King; whom History will have to remember!' [Choiseul's Letter (not DUC de Choiseul, but COMTE, now Minister at Vienna) to Montalembert, "Vienna, 16th August;" and Montalembert's Answer, "Lieberhausen [means LIEBEROSE], 31st August, 1759:" in Montalembert, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... and will not have them tempted or corrupted by the evil influences, moral, social, and intellectual, that emanate and surround those "whited sepulchres"—the godless schools—as the miasm emanates and surrounds the pestilent marsh. In all these schools the children are carefully trained in Christian practices, prayers, and religious duties, as well as taught a good, plain, practical course of studies. In fact, they are truly educated; while in the Public Schools they are simply instructed, as you might ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... undersigned memorialists cannot withhold them from the Hon. General Assembly of Rhode Island. They invoke the General Assembly to exercise their constitutional powers, promptly and decisively, for the correction of a long-continued, and wide-spread, and pestilent social evil. They ask them, most respectfully and earnestly, to withdraw, as soon as may be, all legislative sanction of the lottery system, and to save Rhode Island from the enduring reproach of being among the last States to abandon that system. The memorialists ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... which your life and merits have inherited, and to keep the orthodox religion, which you preach, with faithful and blameless devotion, so far as our rude perception allows. For, even before your injunction, we had avoided the communion of Peter, Acacius, and all his followers, as pestilent contagion; and much more now, after the admonition of the Holy See, must we abstain from that pollution. And if there be any others, who have followed, or shall follow, the sect of Eutyches or Peter and Acacius, or have anything to do with their accomplices and associates, ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies
... fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... of their own admirable rhetoric than they knew. Huxley, especially, was much more a literary than a scientific man. It is amusing to note that when Huxley was charged with being rhetorical, he expressed his horror of "plastering the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic, rhetoric," which is itself about as well-plastered a piece of rhetoric as Ruskin himself could have managed. The difference that the period had developed can best be seen if we consider this: that while neither was of a spiritual sort, ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... wishing, there should never an one of them all have above twenty a year—a good stipend, a good stipend, Master Recorder. I in the meantime, howsoever I hate them all deadly, yet I am fain to give them good words. O, they are pestilent fellows, they speak nothing but bodkins, and piss vinegar. Well, do what I can in outward kindness to them, yet they do nothing but bewray my house: as there was one that made a couple of knavish verses on my country chimney, now in the time of my sojourning here at London; and it was thus— ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... is little that goads us with fiercer despair (Those who buy, you perpend, stock, debenture or share, Such as speculate mainly; investors are rare—) Than this growl ill-conditioned of pestilent Bear! ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 12, 1892 • Various
... work, God knows, was as much as she chose That dreary winter-tide, When Death hung o'er the damp and pestilent camp, And his ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... hour of sunset, then, and in the shadow of the hedge old Pleasant, the waggon-horse, having Clem on his back, stood tethered, released from his work, contentedly cropping the rank grass between the clusters of meadow-sweet, and whisking his tail to brush off the flies. The horse-flies had been pestilent all day, and Myra was weaving a frontlet of green hazel twigs to slip under Pleasant's headstall, when she happened to turn and caught sight of her grandmother standing by the upper gate, leaning on her ivory-headed staff, ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... it would brawl and fret along a ravine in the matted shade of a forest, filling it with murmurs; and, after this termagant career, would steal forth into open day, with the most placid, demure face imaginable; as I have seen some pestilent shrew of a housewife, after filling her home with uproar and ill-humour, come dimpling out of doors, swimming and courtesying, and smiling ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... and spoke to her in a manner so crusty that I thought proper to rebuke him, for the woman was comely in her person, and virtuous in her conversation; but the weaver, her husband, was large of make, ill-favoured, and pestilent; therefore did I take him severely to task for the tenor of his conduct; but the man was froward, and answered me rudely with sneering and derision and, in the height of his caprice, he said to his wife: "Whan focks are sae keen of a chance o' entertaining angels, gude-wife, it wad maybe ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... hospitality, friends all," said he, in his slightly swaggering and yet withal effeminate way; "and see, in some measure of return for it, we leave you our Sherwood free from pestilent robbers and evil defiers of the law. When we came to Nottingham there were these and others; but now they are all driven out of our Royal forest—many slain with the arrows of my Hubert, or beaten with the staves of your own fellows. This surely is some sort of gift—see to it ...
— Robin Hood • Paul Creswick |
